


The Man on the Radio Sings About Heartbreak

by GoldenClover



Category: The Pacific (TV)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-04
Updated: 2016-10-04
Packaged: 2018-08-19 11:49:17
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 562
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8205493
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GoldenClover/pseuds/GoldenClover
Summary: Snafu drives down the highway sometime before the sun comes up and sometime after the moon goes down and he plays a lonely drinking game with himself and the radio.





	

Snafu drives down the highway sometime before the sun comes up and sometime after the moon goes down and he plays a lonely drinking game with himself and the radio. He’s got a bottle of cheap whiskey in one hand, one that cost him less than a couple teeth of Jap gold, and a cigarette in the other.

He’s hoping his elbows know how to drive a car, but the bottom of his chest wishes he’d smash into a tree.

There’s a man singing on the radio about heartbreak, and he talks about a girl with golden hair and eyes the colour of the sky. Snafu takes a swig of whiskey for every time the man gets something wrong about how it feels to get your heart broken, and he takes a swig of whiskey for every time the man describes love as sweet.

Ain’t nothing sweet about Snafu and Sledge.

It’s getting closer to dawn, and the sky is starting to look a little less Okinawa rain and a little more Peleliu sand. Snafu thinks about Sledge, just a few hours away, getting up and reading his Hemingway and drinking his expensive coffee like a good little boy. Maybe it’s a tribute to how drunk Snafu is that the thought makes him laugh until he has to pull over.

It’ll take more than a few prayers and more than a few curses to get his old truck going again, but Snafu’s been driving for a little longer than sixteen hours and a human can only run on whiskey and caffeine for so long. He doesn’t know whether it’s tonight or this morning, but in the odd little hour between sunrise and sunset, the world is the prettiest thing he’s seen since Sledge walked into that tent on Pavuvu. And Snafu must be watching through the bottom of an empty whiskey bottle, because he knows that this world ain’t a pretty thing.

It starts to rain, but it’s a different kind than Louisiana rain. This is Alabama rain, and it’s just like Sledge. It’s soft and it’s pretty and it’s sweet, and Snafu closes his eyes because he knows he doesn’t deserve to see it.

The man on the radio isn’t singing about heartbreak anymore. Now it’s a girl with a voice like the ones Snafu used to buy cheap shots for in Bourbon street bars, and he can see her through the radio. She’s blonde and she’s pretty and she’s got wide blue eyes, but she ain’t as pretty as Sledge.

Snafu starts laughing again, but it’s a little bit choked and it’s a little bit tragic, and it isn’t really laughing at all. Snafu hasn’t cried since his momma died and he stopped being Merriell and became Snafu, but he guesses Sledge has been a helluva lot of firsts for him.

The road is feeling a bit too long and Snafu’s eyes are feeling a bit too tired, and he really doesn’t know if Sledge wants to see him at all. Maybe he’d better just turn the car around and go on back to Louisiana and use his days off for something he trusts, like bumming around dive bars with shitty whiskey and even shittier girls.

Yes, Snafu thinks as he turns the engine back on and starts to turn the wheel towards Louisiana, that’s really what he’d better do.


End file.
